Crafting QoL improvement -- placement spacing consistency

[chaosmonkey]

Since the theme of this QoL is the Craft UI and several related improvements, this feels like a good opportunity to bring up the placement spacing inconsistencies. An extremely common example of this is walls. For instance, it's possible to place a wall next to a lightning rod, but it's not possible to place a lightning rod next to a wall.

This is easily the biggest pain point in building. Sometimes you need to destroy a structure just to place something like a lightning rod near it or plant a berry bush and then rebuild those other structures exactly where they already were.

The ideal fix for this might be using the blocking radius as the minimum spacing as it would mean 100% consistency between placing and blocking. Based on my reading of the code however, that would seem rather difficult.

A much simpler but perhaps less robust fix would be to change the default min_spacing from the large value of 3.2 to a smaller value of like 1 or 1.8. This isn't defined as a constant in the code (the magic number 3.2 appears in several places). A third approach might be defining min_spacing on every structure.

In any case, it would be so, so impactful to improve things in this area. I hope that while we are on the subject of crafting QoL that this will be considered.

P.S.

The blocking radius on oceantree_pillar is really big. If these things are placed a generous distance (eg, bit more than a boat radius) from shore, they can still block building on land. This blocking radius could easily be reduced without any issue of structures overlapping the oceantree_pillar visually.

 

Thanks!

[ChibiStarver]

to add to this, add geometric placement to the base game, for people on console who cant get mods we have to rely on very finicky controller movements, we have no way to move in a perfectly straight line every time and for people  building megabases it can take 10 minutes to build something that should take 2 minutes